Graduated with MA 2015
Currently in the PhD program, Department of Anthropology, University of California Los Angeles
As an MA student in the Department of Linguistics at CU- Boulder, I completed two major CLASP-related projects. During the 2013-2014 school year I wrote a paper in which I analyze portions of Rachel Jeantel’s cross-examination in the 2013 Florida v. George Zimmerman trial. In the article, I draw upon transcriptions from the trial to examine ways in which Zimmerman’s defense team used Jeantel’s witness testimony to construct Trayvon Martin as having “reverse-racist”, violent, feelings toward white people and, consequentially toward George Zimmerman. In my second year I completed an MA thesis in which I identify and analyze a sociolinguistic phenomenon called Mock White Girl. In the thesis I analyze the linguistic, embodied, and social practices that constitute the mock performances, as well as the ways in which middle-class whiteness is indexed and reproduced as hegemonic norm in representations of contemporary girlhood in the United States. As a PhD student at UCLA I plan to conduct ethnographic research regarding “adult” ideologies of “types” of girlhood, particularly as they relate to implementations of social control, surveillance, and punishment in schools.